BRENDA BLETHYN
The actress reveals her experience of malaria and the need for Comic Relief and GSK’s partnership
Today, malaria continues to claim almost 500,000 lives every year. Every two minutes, a child dies from the disease. But at long last real progress is being made fighting the disease. Speaking ahead of this year’s World Malaria Day in the GSK Open Series in April, Dr Allan Pamba, GSK vice-president of pharmaceuticals in East Africa, joined award-winning actress and Comic Relief supporter Brenda Blethyn to discuss how to keep up the fight against malaria.
Significant progress has been made: global efforts have more than halved deaths from the disease over the past 15 years. The World Health Organisation has set a target to cut malaria cases and deaths by 90 per cent by 2030. Education, along with businesses, governments and health services all working together, could take us a long way to meeting that goal.
“Over the years we’ve implemented different strategies and we have reduced that death toll to under half-a-million [see World Health Organisation statistics, above]. It’s tremendous progress, so there is hope that we can do this,” says Dr Pamba.
He considers himself lucky. Born in Kenya in the 1970s, one of nine children, Dr Pamba grew up in a village at a time when malaria, malnutrition and poverty were rife.
At the age of just five, it became “normal” to see his friends around him die from malaria. Mothers struggled to get their sick children diagnosed quickly enough. Hospitals – under-resourced and overwhelmed with poorly children – were powerless to stop the rising epidemic.
“If you look at when I grew up as a little boy in Kenya, pretty much all the children that I played with died. And pretty much all of them died from malaria,” he says.
“The sad thing, is that it [my friends dying] was acceptable – it was normal. I was one of nine children, and the reason is that my parents believed they would probably lose half of them to malaria and other diseases.”
Ms Blethyn, who starred in the 2013 TV film, Mary and Martha, about two women whose children both died from malaria, visited Uganda to meet the families of those stricken by the disease, as part of Comic Relief ’s Red Nose Day 2013 campaign.
She agrees progress has been made in fighting malaria, but describes her shock at what she saw. “The mothers were queuing around the block at the hospital I went to. I was totally unprepared for that,” she says.
“There was one lady who came in with a child that was very sick, a two-year-old, it was just about lunchtime and they got him in. We went off for a rest and some lunch, and when I came back I asked the doctor how the little boy was, and was told unfortunately he had died.”
Fighting back her tears, Ms Blethyn continues: “I said, ‘Where’s the mother? How did she take her child?’ And the doctor said, ‘It’s OK, we gave her a bag to put him in.’ It just took my breath away.”
It’s something Dr Pamba recalls all too easily. Before working at GSK, he trained as a physician helping to fight malaria at the front line. But he admits the job involved having to make the most difficult choices.
“In my ward, where we had a capacity to treat 10 children, at any time we could have 100 children sharing that bed space,” he explains. “The typical doctor would be on call at night and you would have four or five mothers turn up within the space of a few minutes.
“What I found so overwhelming is that every one of those five mothers has a child that needs your attention 100 per cent. You are one physician who is between them and living.
“There would be a child in a coma and you would put them on the bed,” he continues. “Then the next mother would come as you were trying to sort the first one out.
“There would be a child who was so white, the palm of the hand would show they had lost their blood because of the malaria. There would be another child who was convulsing. And there would be a child so hot you could boil an egg on their forehead. “You have them all on the bed, and all the mothers look you in the eye, with anticipation and expectation: ‘Let it be my child who lives today.’”
It was not only the families who were overwhelmed and desperate, the hospitals and local healthcare system, too, faced problems which made it more difficult for them to fight malaria properly.
Today, though, things are changing. Simple, low-cost tools are being put in place within communities to help prevent malaria and get early diagnosis quickly so that if a child did get sick, they could get help fast and potentially save their life. No longer should it be the case that it is “normal” for a child who has malaria to die.
One of the most simple, yet highly effective, low-cost tools is, of course, bed nets. “The net covers the bed and it will stop the mosquito biting you in the first place,” explains Ms Blethyn. “Some are impregnated with a chemical that will kill the mosquito if it comes near it. The female mosquito, which is the one that transmits malaria, only feeds at night.”
Another significant development in helping to fight malaria is the use of rapid-testing kits. Easy-to-use tests can determine whether the sick child has malaria and requires immediate medical attention. Dr Pamba adds that effective medicine is available if the patient gets to the hospital on time. “We have good tools in the toolbox, but we need to scale access to these tools,” he says.
But there’s still a considerable amount of work to be done on the front line to educate communities on how to use these low-cost tools like bed nets, as Ms Blethyn explains. “One home I went into, a mother had lost her child,” she says. “I asked her if she used her bed net, and she said yes, absolutely. I went into the bedroom, and it was an old net full of holes, but they were still using it thinking it was going to protect them. It’s so sad, so [we need] education.”
Ms Blethyn says Comic Relief has begun training and educating key people in the community as advocates of using bed nets and testing kits properly – usually religious leaders or village chiefs who will be listened to.
“Working with partners, Comic Relief helped lots of people to enable them to get to the hospital,” she says. “They had mopeds – it may sound a bit basic to us, going to hospital on the back of a moped – but it got them there, and it’s inexpensive.”
Dr Pamba adds that “tremendous progress” has been made. “We have reduced the number of people dying from malaria by about half in 15 years,” he points out. “We can be the generation that fights malaria once and for all and makes great progress. But if we take our foot off the pedal – bang – we are back to the 1970s.
“I think we can reach the 2030 goal of significantly reducing deaths from malaria if businesses and all the other stakeholders come together and play their part. It’s going to be about strong partnerships, starting now, and leading all the way to 2030 to get the job done,” he says.
We have reduced the death toll to under half a million, so there is hope that we can do this
Dr Pamba, GSK